Practically all of Argentina has cried on this one,” says Ignacio
Montoya Carlotto, patting his right shoulder. We are crisscrossing the old
cobblestone streets of San Telmo, the colonial district of the capital, Buenos
Aires. The 36-year-old musician, his crinkly curls prematurely greying, his
mouth fast to resolve into a smile, is not bragging. It’s impossible to walk even
one city block without someone rushing to hug him and then burst into tears, as
he predicted, on his rumpled T-shirt.‘I begged God not to let me die before I found him’: Estela

Carlotto hugs her grandson Ignacio Montoya Carlotto, son of her daughter Laura, who ‘disappeared’ in 1977. Photograph: Leo La Valle/Getty

Maybe it’s because, thanks to his grandmother, the whole of Argentina had been
waiting – praying – for more than 30 years for the day when he would be
“found”. Most Argentinians can remember exactly what they were doing when that
moment finally came in August last year. “When I turned 80, I begged God not to let me die before I found
my grandson,” says Estela Carlotto. Estela has led an extraordinary life,
rising from tragedy into one of the most loved and respected public figures in
Argentina. It took four more years. “We all cried; everyone has something to
say about how they felt to have found this grandson we were all searching for.”

Estela was a 47-year-old schoolteacher, housewife and mother
of three in November 1977 when a death squad from Argentina’s 1976-83
dictatorship picked her daughter Laura off a street in the city of La Plata
where she lived, about 32 miles south of Buenos Aires. Laura, a 22-year-old
political activist, became one of the thousands of young dissidents who were
made to “disappear” by a bloody, fascist regime. Unknown to Estela, her
long-haired, strikingly beautiful daughter was three months pregnant at the
time of her abduction. She was taken to a secret “detention centre” called La
Cacha. There, in her presence, they killed her companion and the father of the
child she was carrying, 26-year-old Walmir Montoya.

Ignacio was born in June 1978 while his mother Laura was
still in captivity. One report states she gave birth handcuffed and was allowed
only five hours with her baby. Two months later, she was dragged out of the
camp and a mock armed confrontation was staged by the military. When her body
was turned over to Estela, she had been shot through the stomach and her face
was smashed, apparently by a rifle butt. Survivors of the camp told Estela
about the birth, and that she had named the newborn Guido, after her father.

For 36 years afterwards, Estela devoted herself to finding
her grandson. All she had was a name, Guido, and an approximate birth date. An
excruciatingly difficult search led her through three decades of legal action
against police officers, military officers and doctors involved in the “missing
grandchildren” cases. Leads were hard to come by. Her grandson had been
swallowed by the complicity and silence that surrounded so many of the regime’s
horrendous crimes.

Estela realised there were many others like herself looking
for the babies of their “disappeared” daughters. They formed a group called the Grandmothers of Plaza de
Mayo, named after the city square facing the presidential palace in
downtown Buenos Aires where they marched, drawing attention to their plight. By
1989 Estela had become president of the association.

The group believes there are some 500 cases of grandchildren
born in captivity. In most cases, the babies were turned over to military
families to raise as their own. In the warped thinking of the profoundly
Catholic yet murderous generals who ruled Argentina then, it would have been
unchristian to kill an innocent, unborn child by executing the expectant
mother. By the same token, in their macabre minds turning the babies over to
“good” military families to raise as their own represented the ultimate victory
over the “godless” left-wing enemy they wished to crush into nonexistence.

Even now, three decades after the collapse of the
dictatorship, some Argentinians defend the military’s campaign against
Cuban-inspired guerrillas in the 1970s, but even the most die-hard
reactionaries draw the line at the baby-snatching cases. Each DNA confirmation
that a missing grandchild had been found and reunited with their biological
family, usually accompanied by legal action against the “mother and father” who
had appropriated them, has been greeted with joy across the political spectrum.

Over three decades of work, 113 cases had been resolved by
the slowly ageing grandmothers, but despite this, Estela Carlotto’s missing
grandson remained unaccounted for, which left a deep, unhealed wound in the
nation’s psyche. Despite being behind the restitution of the grandchildren of
so many of her fellow grandmothers, the white-haired, softly spoken woman who
had endeared herself as a perennial hopeful for a Nobel Peace Prize for
Argentina, and a worldwide symbol of peaceful women’s activism, had not yet
been able to find her own slain daughter’s son. “I am such a well-known public
figure,” says Carlotto. “Everybody kept asking me: ‘When is it going to be your
turn?’”

At the time Ignacio Montoya Carlotto still believed he was
Ignacio Hurban, the only son of Juana and Clemente Hurban, a couple of humble
rural workers who lived near the city of Olavarría on a farm belonging to
Francisco Aguilar, a well-to-do, conservative landowner who died last year. “A few years ago I was watching television with my wife and
Estela comes on talking about the search for her grandson,” Ignacio tells me.
“And I said: ‘Look at this poor woman. It’s heart-breaking – she’s spent her
whole life searching, and she may never find him.’”.. read more: